OLDaily

Blocks or Not? You Decide
Alan Levine, OpenETC, 2021/03/16

In 2018 WordPress introduced a new text editor called Gutenberg. It has been the subject of endless controversy ever since. Instead of providing writers with a single text entry field, Gutenberg divides contents (such as blog posts) into 'blocks'. The advantage is that authors can now incorporate different types of content into their articles - images, design elements, widgets, embeds and more (there's a box that offers dozens of selections). You can also move blocks around in your article. The disadvantage is that it interrupts the smooth writing experience by constantly popping text formatting option boxes right into the middle of your text, instead of outside the editing area. As Alan Levine says, few things are as divisive. "You are either one side or the other." What people really need is a way to switch back and forth, and that's what Levine describes in this article. However, official support for the classic editor plugin stops December 31, 2021, and that could be a problem.

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Are NFTs DRM by Another Name?
Bill Rosenblatt, Copyright and Technology, 2021/03/16

Something is 'fungible' if it can be easily replaced with another item of the same type. For example, we don't really care which dollar bill we receive; they're all basically the same. A non-fungible thing is something that is verifiably unique. Like the Mona Lisa say. So a non-fungible token (NFT) is a digital thing that is verifiably unique. People have been paying a lot for NFTs of famous things recently. Is it a scam? A bubble? Or is it, as suggested in this article, the latest face of digital rights management (DRM). It's a persuasive argument, because what people are actually buying are "NFTs that point to digital objects", and not the objects themselves. "In neither the NFT nor DRM cases do buyers get the same bundle of rights that are guaranteed for a physical object in copyright law," writes Bill Rosenblatt. He may have a case.

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What Self-Service Rate Can You Expect from Artificial Intelligence?
inbenta, 2021/03/16

I was looking at this website while working on another project today, and checking their blog led me to this article, which while promotional for a company called inbenta, asked what I thought was a pretty good question. Now the answer they give - 32% - feels a bit like it was plucked from the air. But the discussion surrounding it about the metrics involved in even thinking about what would constitute a 'self-service rate' was worthwhile. There's another, more general post from last year on key metrics for evaluating chatbot performance. Here's another article from a different company (REVE Chat) on the same topic. And another (LivingActor). These discussions are note theoretical; chatboats are being tested in education now, as Sofy Carayannopoulos's description of the BU111 trial at Wilfrid Laurier University makes clear (pp. 112-127 of this 489 page PDF).

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Moodle’s Sanctimony on Openness is Moot
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2021/03/16

For someone who professes that he doesn't care about the issue, Michael Feldstein has spilled a lot of digital ink over the subject of Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas and openness. His main concern, he writes, is his "concern is with Martin’s apparent hypocrisy, which is underlined by a tone that I read as sanctimonious." The context is Moodle's choice to block various current and former Blackboard companies from using the trademark 'Moodle'. His argument is that Moodle's trademark protection isn't really any different from the way these companies have bundled proprietary software with their Moodle offerings. And anyways, he adds, he can't find an open source version of Moodle's own MoodleCloud (though it seems to me that this GitHub is full of examples, for example, Moodle-Docker). I can't imagine there will be a favourable response from the community to this one.

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How to Use Breakout Rooms in a Zoom Meeting
Joe Fedewa, How-To Geek, 2021/03/16

I'm not really a fan of breakout rooms (because I don't like being forced into small groups) but I know a lot of people like them and I have seen them used effectively in online and remote learning. This article delivers what the title promises, a step-by-step guide to creating breakout rooms in Zoom. "Note that to use breakout rooms in a meeting, you’ll need to be the host and use the desktop client." Related: how to use breakout rooms in a Microsoft Teams meeting.

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Community credentials
Resonate, 2021/03/16

The W3C's Verifiable Credentials standard is a mechanism for proving things digitally. "A verifiable claim (VC) is a qualification, achievement, quality, or piece of information about an entity's background such as a name, government ID, payment provider, home address, or university degree." This might be an alternative to digital badges. The community credentials project from Resonate offers a reference implementation (see the technical overview) and according to a recent press release is nearing launch. Code on GitHub.

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